NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

  My grandfather, the late Joaquin Flores Lujan or Tun Jack, dedicated half of his life to displaying, demonstrating and teaching about Chamoru blacksmithing. He taught more than a dozen apprentices and presented a hundreds of fairs and schools. He was recognized as a Master of Chamoru Culture for his dedication to the trade that he was taught by his father from the age of 9, and received many awards for his work in promoting it.   For years I would take grandpa to the Chamorro Village where he had a shop to display and sell his tools. He had on the walls photos, certificates, newspaper articles about himself. He also had tools from his father and examples of the tools a blacksmith uses and the stages different tools go through in their creation. He also had his many awards. On shelves and tables he had the several Governor's Art Awards, which later became the Maga'låhi Art Awards that he had received during the tenures of Governors Ada and Gutierrez.    For about 20...

After attending a conference where everyone couldn't stop talking about Ferdinand Magellan for three days straight, I could not help but think about one of the more intimate ways that the explorer has been invoked within my family. Many Chamoru families will mention Magellan in the usual ways, as the source of civilization, Christianity or modernity, as the limit of Chamoru existence, where prior to Magellan there is primitivity and savagery. They may mention him generically as being the first colonizer or the beginning of the end for the Chamoru people, even though he did not directly colonize Guam, and such a process would begin more than 140 years later under the guidance of Påle' San Vitores.  The interesting way that my family and in particular my grandfather Tun Jack Lujan, the late Chamoru Master Blacksmith would bring in Magellan's gifts, was through the metaphor of metal. Metal is always brought into play to provide meaning to the early years of European con...

Rlene Santos Steffy published the article below during the summer as part of her iTintaotao Marianas feature series in The Guam Daily Post. I was honored to be included amongst so many other older and more esteemed activist and scholars. I conducted several long interviews with Rlene, some focusing on history and others on political status. I was surprised by her chosen route for this article, focusing on my learning the Chamorro language and my relationship to my grandparents. I was surprised, but not disappointed. The quote that she used at the start of the article is very much what I continue to feel about my Chamorro identity. Namely that if not for my grandparents, I wouldn't have much of a Chamorro identity and probably wouldn't speak Chamorro or care as much about the fate of the Chamorro people. Reading this article made me sen mahålang for my grandparents. I miss them every day, everytime I use the Chamorro language. Kada fumino' Chamorro nina'siente yu...

This article about my grandfather, the Chamorro Master Blacksmith Joaquin Flores Lujan or "Tun Jack" was first published in the Pacific Daily News on October 14 and October 21, 2016. I have been missing my grandparents like crazy since they passed away in 2013 and 2015, and sometimes only writing about them can help me overcome the sadness I feel.  December is always difficult, as this is the month that grandma, Elizabeth Flores Lujan, passed away three years ago. This is also a difficult month emotionally because of all the family emphasis and for Chamorros, the fact that December 8th represents when our elders, i mamparientes-ta, i manamko'-ta, were swallowed into the beast of a great war.  I keep writing about my grandparents because I find myself remembering things that I struggle with at other times. It don't know why that is the case, perhaps it is because I feel more secure in the fact that as I am writing/typing, I am keeping their stories live. Kee...

Last year I gave a presentation to a high school class here on Guam about the way we can understand Guam history, its trends, its tendencies, its cycles through various Chamorro sayings. For some reason, today I have that presentation on my mind. I undertake a similar activity in my World History and Guam History courses. In order to understand what history as a concept is, I don't give students definitions per se, instead I give them 28 - 30 quotes that people have said about history and its characteristics, its importance or its irrelevance. No single quote is meant to encapsulate everything or explain and cover everything, but rather they each provide some texture to aspects, some structural understanding or descriptions to tendencies. History in the mind of one scholar is an essential part of human activity, for another it is an illusion, a means of trying to imagine control over things you have no control over. I find the complicated mess that the quotes crea...

This image is from a painting by Joe Babauta who passed away last year and was one of my favorite professors when I was at UOG. You might recognize the figure in the bottom right corner, as it was supposed to be my grandfather, Joaquin Flores Lujan in his blacksmith garb.  When I was taking art classes at UOG, I didn't have much space to paint at home and so I would often sneak into the secon d floor studio at night and paint until morning. I had a small black CD player that eventually got covered with paint from my sessions and I would blare Chamorro music while I worked. Joe, who would often times sleep in his office, would come out all groggy when a song played that he particularly liked. At this time I was just learning to speak Chamorro and was just getting into Chamorro music. Every time "Matulaika i Siniente," "Ayuda Un Keyao Taotao" or "Guahu sin Hagu" would come on he would suddenly appear at the studio door wailing like a ...

National Endowment for the Arts For Immediate Release March 23, 2015 It is with great sadness that the National Endowment for the Arts acknowledges the passing of 1996 National Heritage Fellow Joaquin Flores Lujan, a blacksmith who helped to preserve Guam's blacksmithing past, an aspect of the island's Chamorro culture that combines Spanish colonial and local influences. Joaquin "Jack" Flores Lujan was born March 20, 1920, in Guam. He was the only child to learn the art of blacksmithing from his father, who in turn had learned the skills from his uncle. He mastered the graceful lines and fine finishes of the short Guamanian machete with inlaid buffalo horn or imported Philippine hardwood handles; the preferred angle and bevel of the fosino (hoe); and the practical applications of the other tools. As late as the World War II era, blacksmithing played an essential role in Guam. But the time-consuming work of learning the craft and th...

Last week I penned a column for the Pacific Daily News on the connection between Ha'anen Fino' Chamoru Ha', a challenge for increasing the amount of Chamorro that you speak for one day at the start of this month and FESTPAC, the largest cultural event in the Pacific. Guam will be hosting FESTPAC in 2016 and representatives from 27 different island will be traveling here to share their own heritage and learn more about what Chamorros have to offer the Pacific.  Each week the PDN is publishing a column on FESTPAC titled Saonao yan Eyak, encouraging people to support FESTPAC and help prepare this island to become the cultural center of the Pacific. My column focused on the need to bring the Chamorro language to a healthy state in order to help represent ourselves in a deeper way. The theme of the festival focuses on uniting our different voices of the Pacific. What kind of message do we send to the rest of the Pacific if the voice we use is English...

I'll be at the Sukicon this weekend at the Phoenix Center at Father Duenas school in Mangilao. I will have a bunch of interesting things to display and even some stuff to sell. Sukicon is a gathering or cosplayers, gaming nerds, anime/manga nerds and even comic book geeks. There is an artist alley and different booths by exhibitors. For me, I'll be displaying/selling the following things: 1. I'll be displaying some of my grandfather's tools. I have a nice complete set of the seven traditional tools that I'll put out, as well as some examples of the 150 year history of Chamorro blacksmithing in my family, most notably a machete that is more than 100 years old, and made by my great-grandfather Mariano Leon Guerrero Lujan (Bittot). I also have some tools that my grandfather made and one or two that I helped him make more recently. This will be interesting as I'm sure most of the people attending Sukicon think of "culture" a bit differently, as usually...

Mina'kuatro na Lisayu 12/18/13 My grandfather has a memory that would put elephants to shame. I imagine that he must have spent his youth eating elephant brains in order to develop his uncanny ability to remember what seems like every negative thing that has happened in his life. Good things fade and fizzle in his mind, they drip down his frame and never sink in, but a mistake, a slight, an insult, a lie, when someone has wronged him, those things become etched in his mind. My grandfather can recall people who didn’t pay their fares when he drove a cab for a short period after World War II. He can remember people who cheated playing volleyball before the war. His memory is filled with family scandals over land, gifts that were never reciprocated and loans that were never paid back. Part of the reason grandpa has this personality is because he was the oldest of his siblings and has felt like he has given so much to his family over the years and not ...